Russell Jones’s collection, The Green Dress Whose Girl is Sleeping is much about the serendipitous little moments in life as it is about the huge losses. His constantly changing style enables this; he moves from haiku to couplets in the same way his poems move from quiet moments outside chip shops to moments of contemplation Read More
Thomas Lynch is an American award winning poet and writer. He won the American Book Award for his publication, Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade, which was also short-listed for the National Book Award, and his essays and poems have appeared in a host of distinguished magazines and newspapers including Harper’s, The New Yorker, Read More
A Hatfield Mass is, in the main, a sequence of ekphrastic poems written after Martyn Crucefix’s visit to a Henry Moore sculpture exhibition in Hatfield House, Hertfordshire (Crucefix has assured many interviewers that this is, in fact, his real name). Crucefix’s sixth published poetry collection is thus structured: six poems inspired by six Moore sculptures, Read More
“For all flesh is as grass”. With this biblical epigraph from Brahm’s Ein deutsches Requiem, Sarah Holland-Batt declares what is at the heart of her most recent poetry collection: nature. Holland-Batt is an Australian poet whose first book of poetry Aria, published in 2008, won multiple awards, among them being the Judith Wright Prize. The Read More
As a North Walian, I picked this slim volume of poems, drawn to the name “Llanberis” on page eight. I hoped there would be more poems about North Wales. There aren’t any poems about North Wales but that doesn’t matter. Selina Nwulu well deserves to be the young poet laureate for London, where she now Read More
If your first foray into a multi-award-winning poet’s work is his eleventh published collection, it’s natural that you might approach it with a little bit of trepidation. That, in any case, was my experience. Indeed, a sense of the mysterious and the uncertain never quite left me throughout my reading of Matthew Sweeney’s Inquisition Lane Read More
Valerie Laws, in the title pages of this poetry collection, is described as “Poet, crime novelist, performer, playwright, Writer-in Residence at science institutes, sci-art installation specialist, mathematician.” Phew! Like many other writers and artists, Laws clearly has her fingers in many different creative pies; this is very much in evidence in the varied subject matter Read More
Recipient of the 2014 Scottish Book Trust New Writer Poetry Award, Bridget Khursheed was already known by many on the poetry circuit before the publication of Roads to Yair. Some may argue that her approach to poetry is hardly traditional in that very tradition-aware part of the country, but there is no doubt that her Read More
Red peppers and plantain, hibiscus and hummingbirds, saltfish and snapper, kaiso and calypso – all feature in Malika Booker’s debut collection, Pepper Seed, as its narrative slips between Guyana, Grenada, Trinidad and Brixton to tell intertwined personal and political stories. Booker’s writing is at once both searing and beautifully lyrical, the past slipping into the Read More